Wow! Check out the fantastic cover art on the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which just landed on my doorstep this morning. Beaut!

It’s a close-up from a much larger painting, “Folksinger”, by artist Greg Kirch in Waterloo, Ontario.

I have two poems in the current issue: “A tall girl” and “Barsby Park”.

It’s not the first time my poetry has appeared in this magazine. But each time is indeed a pleasure.

The New Quarterly holds a special place in my life. It was the first literary magazine to accept and publish a poem of mine back in 2005 when I started my journey into The Mind of Poetry after a 25-year career as a freelance journalist and nonfiction author. I had only been writing poetry for 3 weeks(!) when I wrote this one poem, “Crab Dock“, which I decided to mail out to a few magazines. The New Quarterly replied in just 12 days (a world record for a lit mag) offering to publish it. A couple of months later, the poem was in print, and I was $30 richer and well on my way into the mind-expanding realm of words that can mean more than one thing at the same time.

I am a big believer in Signs from the Universe. And TNQ’s acceptance of one of my very first poems (and with such lightning speed) ranks high on that list. Thanks for being there, TNQ!